wine

Franzia’s been mighty busy. Franzia’s recent labels proclaim “The World’s Most Popular Wine.” That’s a lot of bag-in-box and other packages. The label goes further to claim this wine is “also the World’s most cost and carbon efficient wine.” There is a nice chart with pretty icons to support this claim at least in part. The brand owner has explained:

The wine industry is perhaps the most vulnerable of any food and beverage producer to “carbon criticism,” due to its historical reliance on heavyweight glass packaging and its failure to migrate to more environmentally sensitive packages. … As the world’s leader in Bag-In-Box (BIB) packaging, [The Wine Group, Inc.] is in a unique position to assist retailers with innovative 3L and 5L BIB packages that eliminate the freshness trade-off associated with most other forms of alternative packaging. … The Wine Group is taking aggressive measures to reduce overall energy consumption by our wineries, and leading the industry to implement local bottling of imported and exported wine. This reduces carbon emissions through unnecessary transportation of heavy glass,” said [David Kent, CEO].

This packaging consortium has a good FAQ about the environmental issues but still it would be good to see more sources and evidence.

There are several pig-themed wine (and beer) labels this year. Maybe they are around every year, but we never quite noticed them until all the swine-induced hysteria. It so happens that the SWINE Festival is coming up next month, smack dab in the center of Iowa. The label says SWINE is nothing less than “Iowa’s premier pork and wine event.” No word yet on whether the flu situation is hurting or not hurting this event. Both the orange label, and the green label, are Iowa rosé made by Madison County Winery of Saint Charles, Iowa.

Don’t miss this story in the New York Times today. Alex Elman is a wine taster and trader in New York. She happens to be blind and this appears to hold her back from almost nothing. Alex explains:

I call myself the blind wine chick. … I’ve always had that sense of smell and taste that’s been heightened. … I’m in that glass. … I see the grapes. In my mind’s eye of course. I see the soil.

She also speaks several languages, skis, swims and so on. We’ve had the pleasure to work with Alex in her wine business and can confirm that she’s also undaunted when dealing with the government. By the way, the New York Times is doing a great job morphing from a paper to a multimedia extravaganza, and this should not be lost amid all the gloom and doom about publishing.